Construction workers building a new public safety building in Thronton, Colorado made a surprising discovery: a rare triceratops skull and skeleton.
This skull has probably been laying there for at least 66 million years, Joe Sertich, Denver Museum of Nature and Science curator of dinosaurs, told the Denver Post. It is one of three triceratops skulls found along Colorado’s Front Range mountains.
“My heart was racing,” Sertich said, according to Post. “As soon as (we) uncovered it and realized this was a horn of a triceratops and not just another leg bone or part of a hip, it made the site really exciting.”
According to the museum, the crew so far has unearthed a horn and shoulder blade. Sertich said that most fossils found in Denver are from the Ice Age, which was roughly 10,000-12,000 years ago. Most belong to mammoths, camels, and similar creatures. Sertich is “over the moon that this is a dinosaur fossil,” reports the Post.
Most of Denver is covered in parking lots, houses and shopping malls, which means it is unusual for crews to get deep into the original rock layers, Sertich explained. The crews were working on a fire and police substation when they were stopped by an object. Luckily, one of the construction workers realized that it could be a fossil.
“A lot of times these will be plowed up and they won’t be recognized,” Sertich told the Post. “And we’re really lucky in this case that it was recognized as fossils and we got the call and were out here and able to salvage the site, and actually collect these fossils.”
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